Socially Dangerous Elements

“Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To borrow from the fearless and incisive Celia Farber, I don’t know where to begin, I just know that must begin. Any attempt to write anything in these times is, as she puts it, to be simultaneously 1) inconsolable and 2) committed to consolation. I am indeed both of these things, even if I do not know how to offer consolation, to myself or anyone else. But it is beginning to feel like dereliction of duty to not at least make some small effort. 

That said, this Substack newsletter going forward will concern itself with “politics,” for lack of a better term. Really, biopolitics—this intersection of the body, free will, and state surveillance and intrusion that has seemingly barged into all of our lives over the last two years. I understand that not everyone who signed up is here for that sort of thing. I have a separate mailing list at my website that I use for general EP/health discussions and notifications, so if you would prefer to bow out of political conversation but don’t want to ghost me completely, that is the best avenue for doing so.

Okay, that’s out of the way. You’ve been warned. On to the outrage, the despair (and, on a good day, perhaps also some consolation—although I can’t promise.) 

I read Celia’s courageous, enraging, and much despised piece in Harper’s fifteen years ago, but rediscovered her through RFK Jr’s book about Fauci, which quotes her extensively. I was quite surprised that so much of the book is devoted to Fauci’s HIV/AIDS history and playbook—surprised not because that history isn’t relevant to what we are dealing with now and understanding who Fauci really is, because it is absolutely incredibly relevant—but surprised because it’s so politically radioactive to even discuss the topic let alone question The Dominant AIDS Narrative. But Fauci’s career was absolutely built on HIV/AIDS, and the techniques and strategies he honed and perfected in the 1980s and 1990s to advance his career, consolidate his power, advance his globalist, biopolitical, and transhumanist worldview, and nakedly enrich himself and his associates are what today comprise the impenetrable structure of the all-powerful Covidocracy. To understand the present, we must see the past much more clearly. And RFK reveals the past, mercilessly.

The book spells out a list of Fauci’s core tactics, and those of you who grew up in the dark shadow of HIV as I did will recognize them. Even if you don’t read the whole book (I wouldn’t blame you—I haven’t finished it yet myself, and it’s about 800 pages long) everyone needs to at least read this list. If you recall AIDS hysteria in the 80s and 90s, the terror of waiting for a test result of an invisible and asymptomatic pathogen, paranoia of contagion from drinking glasses and public toilets and sweaty strangers in bars, if you know anything about the criminal debacle of AZT, the diagnostic criteria variance across different populations, and all the rest—it’s all depressingly familiar: 

• Pumping up pandemic fears to lay the groundwork for larger budgets and greater powers,

• Incriminating an elusive pathogen,

• Fanning hysteria by exaggerating disease transmissibility,

• Periodically stoking waning fear by warning of mutant super-strains and future surges,

• Suggesting substantial changes in how people live, ostensibly to save their lives,

• Keeping the public and politicians engaged through confusing and contradictory pronouncements,

• Using faulty PCR and antibody tests and manipulating epidemiology to inflate non-verifiable case and death numbers, to maximize the perception of an imminent calamity,

• Ignoring and dismissing effective off the shelf therapeutics,

• Directing energy and money toward profitable new patented drugs and vaccines,

• Championing dangerous and ineffective drugs originating in government labs as the only solution to the pandemic,

• Partnering with large Pharma companies and giving his partners advantages in the race for approval,

• Allowing preferred companies to skip key testing metrics, 

• Curtailing clinical trials to conceal severe safety and efficacy problems,

• Sabotaging, discrediting, and sweeping aside more effective therapies and non-patentable medicines that might compete with new patented medicines and vaccines,

• Subjecting competitive products to efficacy and safety studies that are designed to fail, 

• Allowing thousands of sick patients to suffer and die by denying them access to demonstrably effective competitive remedies, by publicly protesting the existing remedies were not subject to “randomized placebo testing,” 

• Controlling the key “independent” committees that approve and mandate new drugs by populating them with his own hand-picked PIs, 

• Presenting these agencies as “independent” and trustworthy experts, 

• Using the Emergency Use Authorization to fast-track the concoctions through a rigged approval process to market, 

• Using official government propaganda to market his concoctions, 

• Employing “Science by Press Release” to control narratives, 

• Making exaggerated claims for the efficacy of his products, 

• Using pervious and ineffective post-marketing surveillance systems to conceal mass injuries and deaths from the public,

• Preventing debate and censoring dissenting voices in popular media, social media, and scientific publications, and

• Promising ultimate salvation with vaccines.

This list makes it very clear in case it wasn’t already: we have been psy-opped, and we’ve been psy-opped hard.

The specifics of the Covid playbook are derived from the HIV playbook, quite blatantly so. But what is also obvious to me at this point is that this sort of biopolitical authoritarianism is perhaps only the highest and most potent form of a broader scheme of social engineering and control, which I call indentured empowerment. This is a broad concept and there is a lot to say about it, but the basic idea is: it is a process by which your innate resources (including your time, attention, and social and human capital) are captured and harvested by the state and its corporate sponsors to identify your deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities for which useless “solutions” can then be marketed back to you in exchange for more of your time, attention, and social and human capital.

I first developed this concept when researching and writing my dissertation, which was a long and torturous process of coming to terms with how powerful bureaucrats in the state of Alaska have commodified Alaska Native poverty, inequality, suicide, addiction, criminality, and general suffering to 1) suppress competitive economic competition over petroleum resources and to 2) entrench and enrich themselves and their community allies as stalwart advocates and social engineers of Native “empowerment” and “healing.” These bureaucrats—in enthusiastic collaboration with opportunistic social entrepreneurs among the Native elite and activist community—both create the problem and generate sustained dependence on “solutions” that only perpetuate the problem. After all, if they actually solved the problem, everyone would be out of a job and the budgets would dry up, and no one wants that.

This model of indentured empowerment is at work most everywhere you look, and it makes perfect economic sense that it would be. It is a form of neo-colonialism and theft, the rich and powerful extracting and redistributing wealth from the weak and poor as much as they can get away with—a tale as old as time. What makes it unique in my view—and so formidable—is its ability to seize moral authority as the one true friend of the weak and downtrodden and therefore more effectively shame anything resembling dissent.

The irony here is that the more those outside of the model point out the nature of the exploitation in an attempt to actually improve the situation, the more efficiently they are constructed as uncaring and evil. (ie: you’re an “AIDS denier” if you ask out loud if HIV drugs are like AZT and nevirapine are overprescribed and excessively toxic, let alone efficacious. You’re an “anti-vaxxer” if you gently oppose government mandates, let alone point out vaccine injury. Your questioning of the Covid narrative—any aspect, any criticism—makes you part of the “dirty dozen,” a dangerous peddler of “misinformation.” You’re cruel, you’re racist, you want people to die, you only care about yourself. In this upside down world, epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard are framed as “fringe” and “ridiculous" by public health power brokers. Nobel laureates like Kary Mullis (the inventor of PCR technology and especially sharp-tongued critic of Fauci) and Mike Levitt (co-signer of the Great Barrington Declaration) are tarred and feathered as somehow anti-science for raising questions and offering alternatives to lockdowns like focused protection for different risk groups. 

As I discovered in my dissertation research, we can find this dynamic at work in the relationship between the corporate state and every vulnerable population, not just Covid or HIV. Everywhere, corporate and political interests have fused to 1) identify the plight of the wretched; 2) offer scientistic succor in the form of useless and/or dangerous “solutions” that perpetuate the suffering and generate additional funding and job security for yet more “solutions” (toxic drugs, social programs to build “resilience,” early education interventions, etc); and 3) viciously attack dissenting or critical voices in the bluntest tribal terms available while self-propagandizing as morally righteous and scientific.

And this dynamic is, of course, absolutely rampant in the emerging biosecurity state. Indeed, it defines it. 

Consider a simple, thoroughly appalling and instructive example from the HIV debacle. Early on, GlaxoSmithKline (then called Burroughs Wellcome) profited richly from both the cause and the “solution” to the AIDS epidemic. GSK held the patent on containers for “poppers,” a form of amyl nitrite that was a powerful vasodilator and extremely prevalent sex drug in the 1980s gay party scene. GSK spent most of its advertising budget for poppers on ads in gay magazines—one ad called them “the real thing.” The use of poppers has long been definitively linked to a panoply of health concerns, and the FDA continues to warn of their use to this day. Among their known risks is the development of Kaposi’s sarcoma and T-cell suppression, both classic presentations of symptomatic AIDS. GSK, then, as one of the leading manufacturers of what we understand now to be a key cofactor of the AIDS epidemic, turned around and profited in the toxic treatment of HIV with their deadly chemotherapy drug azidothymidine or AZT—a drug zealously championed by Fauci. AZT was incredibly toxic, initially prescribed at very high levels, and almost certainly killed more than it helped in those early years. Those deaths, which were tallied as AIDS deaths, underlined the urgency for more and more funding and power for Fauci and his NIAID bureaucracy. At the same time, that bureaucracy (and Fauci himself) claimed moral and scientific authority (with the help of friends in the press) to marginalize internal and external critiques of both AZT and popper culture as anti-science and homophobic, respectively. 

Sound familiar yet? Perhaps, I don’t know, a little bit like how Pfizer’s cardiomyopathy drug Vyndaquel (developed in 2019) is so highly in demand for some weird reason that it’s a “primary driver” of the company’s second quarter profits this year?

These are particularly brazen examples of simultaneously manufacturing and profiting from a problem, but indentured empowerment does some of its most effective work on slipperier, less obvious levels. When the state locks you down to “keep you safe,” your anger, anxiety, loneliness, and escapism are operationalized, categorized, and monetized by your google searches, your porn history, your doordash orders, your Zoom eye rolls, your Facebook chats, and your instagram likes. All of these and more are potent fodder that reveal your insecurities and appetites for any corporate interest that might want to leverage them, and then precision trigger them again so they can be leveraged against you in perpetuity. Don’t like it? Don’t complain. Don’t question. Don’t look for ulterior motives behind the status quo. All of those things constitute dangerous misinformation that will get you suspended from social media, ironically forced to the fringes where they claimed you were all along. It’s quite an effective scheme.

Most of us don’t quite realize it yet, but we are essentially Big Pharma serfs. We are mere batteries in their vast matrix. And really, “Big pharma” is a misnomer at this point. Thanks in considerable part to Fauci’s four-decade reign of terror at NIAID, the pharmaceutical industry and the state have fused more or less completely. The biostate’s domain is now all of human life and its putative “improvement.”

There is a creeping feeling that there will soon not be anywhere to hide. Not just from our devices, which are terrible and intrusive enough, but even if we were to dispense of them entirely (an impossible thought experiment), what if participating in “normal” life and commerce requires yielding to digital currency? And even if you manage that, how can you escape mRNA in your lettuce?  Or GMO mosquitoes? Or surveillance of your garbage? Or your insurance-mandated “smart toilet?” 

It’s enough to want to move to an off grid cabin in the woods to hide from the panopticon and pen anti-futurist screeds, but the last person who did that didn’t handle it very well, although he certainly did his best to warn us what was coming. The truth is, there is nowhere to go. There is nowhere to hide. Not really. There might be pockets of illusory autonomy for a while; perhaps that is the best we can hope for. But unless we are prepared to completely detach from society—including the internet, the banking system, and even from crypto, which I’m not at all convinced is free from the all-knowing gaze—Big Brother will still be watching, cataloging, harvesting, using your private desires and fears more and more efficiently against you. All in the name of moral righteousness, wrapped in the mantle of Science and Virtue and Progress, The Experts Know Best, this is For Your Own Good.

It’s all just a tiny bit depressing. 

Celia, like many others I admire, casts our current moment in classically spiritual terms: There is a battle for our souls afoot. There are forces of good and evil in the world. I am sympathetic to such inferences. My own mysticism is less fire and brimstone, more Truth Will Out. I find solace in the fact that despite the most sophisticated array of coverups, psyops and propagandizing in human history, they still can’t completely hide the truth. There are plenty of people who see it, or at least pieces of it. We can still find each other, although it is more and more difficult to do so. There is community. There is solidarity. There is connection and meaning. We still have these things, and they are what preserve our humanity. We lose them, however, if we trade away what we know to be true for a shred of security. And this is the essence of the oldest spiritual lessons, across every tradition. We are endlessly compelled to deceive ourselves and others for our own gain, but in that deception we paradoxically expose ourselves to greater and greater control. We give our sovereignty away, in exchange for self-preservation. But what “self” are we preserving, if not that part of ourselves that will not be surrendered?

This all sounds very abstractly philosophical and mystical in part because these matters are not normally considered by those who have not directly confronted their own mortality. I recall one of Jordan Peterson’s main rules for life: “Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.” Those aren’t just pretty words for him; he’s profoundly inspired by those who have historically resisted tyranny and persecution, especially Socrates and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and what they wrote and valued most when they stood to lose everything, including their lives. What both Socrates and Solzhenitsyn and many others have discovered at the sharpest edge of state violence is that there is, in fact, “something worse than death,” and that is the abdication of the self out of fear of the state. The full surrender of one’s free will is the only truly intolerable thing. Hollywood recognizes the potency of this core spiritual truth and endows many of its most charismatic tragic heroes with it.

I don’t know how much that all counts as consolation, but for me, truth—or at least not participating in the lie—is a meaningful moral compass. It is, after all, the same moral compass that has served as the only thing resembling consolation to historical figures who would give absolutely anything for the freedoms of speech and association I can still, for now, claim. In other words: suck it up, Buttercup. We’re not dead just yet.